Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => The Secret History => Topic started by: firebug on <08-19-17/2254:35>
-
So I was having a discussion with someone, and a point came up about when was the earliest in the SR timeline that someone could have been changed into a Vampire (not counting things like Red where they just mysteriously have existed blah blah). HMHVV Strain 1 was isolated in 2034, but presumably it could have been around as early as the Awakening. Which makes me wonder...
What was cause of the introduction/arrival of vampires, ghouls, and other Infected? Basically, if HMHVV is a virus transmitted via the Infected, where did it come from? Maybe some ancient vampires woke up and started feeding, transmitting it that way. But what about other Infected that couldn't have just somehow gone into hibernation? Ghouls especially, as they're the least magical and couldn't have just survived the 5th World without being able to repopulate. How did the Sixth World get ghouls? Did it start with only Strain 1, then it mutated into other strains, until it became the Kreiger strain?
I'm curious if there's any official answers or theories about this. It's a bit of a "chicken or the egg" scenario. "What infected the first Infected?"
-
Red got turned in his young adult life if I recall from a vampire attack. He talks about it in Crimson.
I also have thought about this too. It's possible it's a genetic disease and once the mana levels became high enough people started to express as werewolves or vampires or whatever. Some of the strains, very specifically ghouls can still reproduce the old fashion way.
But I'd really like to think it was an archeologist that accidentally infected themselves while exploring ancient ruins where the virus has laid dormant for millenniums.
For vampires, it's possible they may have laid low like the immortal elves as well.
-
IIRC, HMHVV -- at least one strain, maybe more -- can be carried by a few very specific non-human vectors within which it is not active. I can't point to a book just offhand in which it says this, but my SR-fu does have this as a memory of something being stated, probably in SR3. (Drop bears, probably. It's always drop bears, just like it's never lupus.)
-
Vampires yeah, easy to say there were some vampires that were in hiding one way or another. I'm mostly curious about ghouls. Did they show up later, or at the same time as vampires were re-introduced during the Awakening?
Wyrm's point could make sense, if the Kreiger strain came from another paracritter, but of course that's still an egg/chicken thing.
-
Well, recently it's been suggested that there were vampires in their own little down-time nests - I think it's Red who says something about this in one of the recent books, or implies it at the very least. The more powerful the vampire, the more s/he had to 'sleep', to cocoon up and try to survive 5K years off 'stored mana', as it were.
But I'm not sure why you're saying that even if there weren't pre-6W vampires that nonhuman carriers existing would be a chicken/egg thing. I mean, clearly the virus came first; an Awakened virus that mutated so that when it infected a humanoid host, it made some vastly radical changes to the host in order to prolong the virus's existence -- some form of genetic immortality being the goal of every living thing that has genetics -- and suddenly you have the first vampire. I mean, think of it instead as an inversion of ebola; ebola comes from somewhere, a viral infection that can be found in nonhuman hosts in deep dark Africa. Once it hits a human, well, it burns through them ... but that virus which we call HMHVV changes them instead of slaying them.
Simply put, the first Infected would not necessarily need to have been 'transformed' by another of their kind; only susceptible to whatever origin-state elements were required. And the various strains can then evolve from the first one.
-
The Metahuman genes were present during the whole downtime, they were just unable to express at full potential because of the low magic level, so people with those genes where basically just humans (and they did not change when the mana level raise because their development was over).
We could imagine the same for HMHVV, the virus was there the whole time during 5th world, but unable to do anything, or so little, that is went unnoticed.
-
In my mead canon the dormant virus was able to express itself whenever people managed to generate enough positive background count to counter the extreme negative bc - for example when there were a lot of gruesome blood sacrifices...
-
It'd be weird if the pre-Awakened analogue of HMHVV had been airborne, and needed the Awakened to make the jump to being able to Infect . . .
-
from the description of vampires in Second Edition, p.231:
The infection only seems to reach its full virulence in a magic-rich environment, but there are indications that both virus and vampires were present before the Awakening.
Running Wild, p.61:
Popular literature is rife with tales of most of the Infected. Vampires and banshees, for instance, have been with us since the Awakening in 2011, with stories about similar creatures going back centuries.
on ghouls:
scientific speculation in Target: Smuggler Havens p.28:
Some scientists think that the original ghouls might have been humans with a dormant HMHVV retrovirus in their DNA. When magic came back, the virus reactivated, and people with a strong enough concentration of it became ghouls with the ability to infect other people.
which by the time of Running Wild is presented as fact:
Ghouls began appearing in 2011, just like elves and dwarfs but in far smaller numbers. [...] That all changed, of course, in 2021 when the first wave of goblinization hit ... and ghouls began appearing by the hundreds in city after city across the entire globe. We know now that the same ebb in mana that triggered goblinization activated the latent RNA of the Ghilani wichtiviridae retrovirus in the genes of all those poor unfortunates fifty years ago.
-
Thanks, Loki! That's exactly what I wanted to see!
-
So it was present in X% of the population but without a sufficient background count it didn't actually manifest just laid dormant. As the background levels rose those carriers turned into Ghouls, Vampires, ETC rather than elves, dwarves. Interesting and a little worrying. We know we're getting new species variants popping up here and there as the count rises which could imply (especially since Red mentions the vampiric hunger getting worse in one book) there might be a nastier variant of HMHVV still lurking in some people's genes.
-
I think you could turn in to a orc and also a ghoul. So it is not one or the other.
-
Honestly I thought it was like Anthrax or something, where it can lie dormant waiting for the right circumstances for it to flourish. In Anthrax's case, that's moisture and a host. In HMHVV it's background magic, general magic levels, whatever term you wanna use. And a host. It needs that magic to survive for some reason and the world just hit the tipping point. (Though I don't know WHERE it'd be lying dormant. That part's beyond me.)
-
there might be a nastier variant of HMHVV still lurking in some people's genes.
As a bit of background, retroviruses which integrate into the germ line are a real thing, and several percent of our genome are assumed to be such viruses which became inactive through mutations. Could be that some of those are not actually dead, just waiting for the right mana level...
HMHVV I is a bit more complicated, it normally requires an infected being using the Infection power and (depending on the book) causes infertility or kills the embryo. One possibility would be that pregnancies become viable when the mana level drops.
-
There were Ghouls and Infected present in the SR universe ever since the first novels rolled out.
In the book Changeling it is mentioned that when the Magic returned and the races showed their true appearance ghouls appeared as well.
-
Though I don't know where it would be lying dormant. That part's beyond me.
Based on my knowledge of viruses, it would need to be a living host of some sort. A virus has only a single strand of DNA, where living beings have two strands of DNA - the virus invades individual cells, uses the host's double helix of DNA to self-replicate, multiply and spread to nearby cells thus killing the original host cell. Once you hit a critical number of damaged or destroyed cells, the host dies or - in the case of HMHVV - converts the host into a new being by fundamentally altering whole sections of the host's DNA (which is essentially modern day gene therapy in the real world).
Viruses have a lifespan outside of a living organism's body usually measured in minutes. If it requires other factors such as the mana level to replicate itself, then the virus would probably be transferred in a dormant state through the usual routes - blood/fluids, shared items, contaminated food/water, animals or through the birth process.
Of course, with the usual routes of delivery come the usual means of prevention/treatment; destroying carriers, destroying intermediate hosts, education on transmission, pre-exposure drugs for high risk roles (CDC researchers, etc) and retroviral drugs for immediate post exposure treatment.
-
Based on my knowledge of viruses, it would need to be a living host of some sort. A virus has only a single strand of DNA, where living beings have two strands of DNA
As a retrovirus HMHVV should be an RNA virus, when a DNA copy of the virus integrates into the cellular genome the corresponding opposite strand will be synthesised to form double-stranded DNA.
I would say the transformation of the host body doesn't actually fit with retrovirus biology, because these viruses do not carry a lot of information. So where does all the complexity come from? I assume HMHVV is a retrovirus because it is an allusion to the HI-virus which is of course the most famous one.
pre-exposure drugs for high risk roles (CDC researchers, etc) and retroviral drugs for immediate post exposure treatment.
Unless this has changed with Fifth Edition there is no working HMHVV vaccine and no suppressive drugs that could manage the viral load after transformation has set in.
-
Based on my knowledge of viruses, it would need to be a living host of some sort. A virus has only a single strand of DNA, where living beings have two strands of DNA
As a retrovirus HMHVV should be an RNA virus, when a DNA copy of the virus integrates into the cellular genome the corresponding opposite strand will be synthesised to form double-stranded DNA.
I would say the transformation of the host body doesn't actually fit with retrovirus biology, because these viruses do not carry a lot of information. So where does all the complexity come from? I assume HMHVV is a retrovirus because it is an allusion to the HI-virus which is of course the most famous one.
As I've often said, Magic makes Science sit at the Kids' Table while the Adults talk. Just like there aren't scientific reasons why someone should suddenly Goblinize into an Ork or Troll, or undergo SURGE into a Changeling, or how we still haven't identified just what makes a person Awakened (or why one cannot be both Awakened and Emerged). It is like trying to get Newton to explain Quantum Physics.
-
But there is quite a bit of science background interwoven with Shadowrun magic, especially in the field of parabiology. So it's more about finding out where the line between scientific explanation and magic black box runs. And actually the science is not quite as important in this as what Shadowrun authors know of it. Also when it was written. The consensus on some of the topics has shifted during the almost thirty years the game exists.
-
True, but there are many, many areas where it is clearly written that the science goes "We know this magic thing does this. We don't know how it does this, and we don't know where it came from, and we don't know how to stop it, but we can give you a nice scientific description of what it is doing at this moment." But remember that as far as magic goes the 'consensus' started at "Beats the fuck out of me". So the fact that they have some processes identified and can show cause and effect between some things does not mean they are able to figure out what is going on. People realized that drinking stagnant, smelly water was a good way to get sick long before they had any idea about bacteria, parasites, and other such things, to say nothing of the fact that, hey, these rocks that caused the film to go black gave everyone around it cancer. You don't need to know about microbiology to know that a splint and sling can help a broken bone set better. We're basically at Civil War battlefield medicine level when it comes to understanding magic, in part because the 'rules' of magic actually change over time, and in unpredictable ways.
-
Well, there is magical theory. Now, of course a lot of it is probably accumulated practical knowledge but I think it does include theoretical models of magic. The problem is, since it is all made up, we don't have a good grasp of what scholars think they understand, what they can accurately predict and how many questions remain open. Gaps in the knowledge are sometimes pointed out, like the occasional note on a revision, but often what that means is difficult to understand for the same reason. Does a revision include minor special cases or is it a fundamental change in how something is explained. Also there are sources of knowledge like spirits or metaplanar quests that can offer deep insights into the nature of magic, but will not be incorporated easily into the scientific process. Finally the question is can magic be understood? After all there could be a Magic™ reason why we will never fully comprehend how it works.